Suspicious IAM AdministratorAccess Policy Attachment via CloudTrail (via cloudtrail)

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098Account Manipulation
Priv Esc
- T1098Account Manipulation
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the Shai Hulud privilege escalation in AWS where a freshly created IAM user is granted the AdministratorAccess managed policy through an AttachUserPolicy call. Attaching full administrator rights to a user is a high impact action that is rare in normal operations. It followed the creation of a cloudops-monitor identity.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious IAM AdministratorAccess Policy Attachment via CloudTrail (via cloudtrail)

Pivot detection · T1098 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

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